In the cybersecurity infrastructure, the growth of cloud services has been one of the most disruptive phenomena of the Internet age. Even the most popular cloud services (including Yahoo, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook 365, and Dropbox) are vulnerable to attack because their servers run on unencrypted data.
The move to cloud services offers enormous advantages over the internal management of these services. The cloud is scalable, affordable, easy to manage, and accessible to a wide variety of devices from anywhere.
However, since cloud services are a central information database, they are attractive targets for attackers. In addition, even a single misconfiguration of a cloud server can make it vulnerable. If an attacker succeeds in hacking an individual user’s computer or phone, the user’s information is compromised. However, if a targeted attack on a server is successful, information about all users of that server can be lost. For example, Yahoo recently announced that over a billion user accounts had been compromised.
As a result, the security agency has invested heavily in technology and processes to protect servers in the cloud. Many of these, like firewalls, threat detection and analysis, and management processes, is about building “higher walls” around the server. Despite great efforts and investments, the attackers continue to win. However, do not worry about this because Logic Finder will help you to prevent potentially vulnerable attacks.
Let us assume the server is damaged
What if the problem is solved? Instead of figuring out how to secure the server, what if the goal is to keep the data safe, whether or not the server has been compromised? This can be achieved with end-to-end encryption. This means that user data is only decrypted on their PC, smartphone, or IoT architecture never on the server. In the event of a server breach, an attacker can only access encrypted data, which is incomprehensible. Unfortunately, end-to-end encryption is rarely used.
Many cloud service providers promote the use of encryption for security reasons, but the term “encryption” can have several meanings. Most services use what is known as in-transit encryption. Let us look at a general cloud-based email service to show how this works.
As shown in the image illustration, encryption in transit uses encryption to protect a message as it is transmitted from a phone or computer to a server. Technologies such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) are often used. This prevents an attacker from successfully launching a man-in-the-middle attack by observing Internet traffic and observing the content of the communication. With transport encryption, the decrypted message is available on both the device and the server. This makes the server vulnerable to attacks because a successful server failure gives the attacker access to all decrypted messages.
Inactive data encryption means that data on the cloud server’s storage medium is encrypted when not in use. Inactive data encryption can prevent an attacker from accessing information about physical volumes that have been stolen from a data center, even if such physical attacks are extremely rare. Inactive data encryption still cannot prevent a server attack from revealing valuable user data because the server can still “see” the decrypted information. If the server can access raw data, an attacker could do the same.
In this regard, Logic Finder will help overcome the potential vulnerabilities in Cloud Deployments. Our core team will train you to securely use your cloud services and guide you regarding encryption terms. You can register yourself on our website for consistency and get training including network intrusion monitoring and training in this regard.